By Mary Murray
NBC NEWS
HAVANA, Sept. 7 — Thinking about flouting the law
and traveling to Cuba on the sly? Michael
Kozak, chief of the American Mission in Cuba,
says it’ll be riskier than you think. He explains
why in an interview.
Q: What’s your estimate of the number of Americans
who are traveling to Cuba without licenses?
A: We don’t really have a good estimate. The Cubans’
side claims in the 70,000 to 80,000 range. I think it’s quite
a bit lower than that, but because it’s illegal travel, we aren’t
able to measure it now.
Q: I heard the statistic this week that 125,000
Americans are going to be coming here this year
without licenses.
A: I think that’s very high. That’s much higher than the
Cuban side even claims.
Q: This was a Havana travel agent. What’s your
sense of why they’re coming?
A: Well, it depends. First, you have a lot of people
who are coming who are here legitimately. The embargo
regulations permit people who have family here to come
visit them once a year in cases of humanitarian need. We
have a lot of people who are subject to general license —
journalists being one of them — who can come here
regularly. We also grant a lot of licenses for exchange
programs — academic exchanges, humanitarian, religious
exchanges, and that sort of thing. Trying to build
people-to-people contact, which is part of our policy.
Q: And the number of licensed people this year?
A: In the hundreds. I think last year, we took about
3,000 Cubans in the other direction in that category as well.
I think it’s more or less equivalent on both sides. So those
are the legal ones. Now, the illegal ones — from what I’ve
been able to observe myself, it’s mostly people who are
being told that this is some kind of a neat adventurous
vacation and they run no risk by coming here. So I think
you find two kinds of people. One is people who think it
will be a neat vacation, a forbidden spot and they’re being
told there’s no real risk of getting into trouble, which is not
correct. The other are sex tourists — and I have to say,
unfortunately, the Americans who come here are not above
what the other tourists here do. The Cubans exploit the
young men and women, or girls and boys really, in this
country quite heavily to attract tourists — and so that’s part
of it.
Q: What are they risking?
A: There’s various penalties for violations of the
embargo. For many years — and one reason this idea that
there wasn’t much in the way of prosecution got going —
the only penalties were criminal penalties. Under the Trading
With the Enemy Act, which is the parent to the embargo
regulations, you can go to jail for 10 years, and individuals
can be fined up to $250,000. But, as with most criminal
prosecutions, that’s a serious endeavor for a prosecutor to
bring cases like that, so they tended to concentrate on the
big violators rather than the small ones.
However, what people should know is that the law was
changed in the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, and the
Treasury Department was given authority to impose civil
penalties as well as these criminal penalties. In these cases,
it’s much easier. The Treasury Department simply has to
advise someone that they have reason to believe that they
violated the embargo and if they can’t show causes as to
why they shouldn’t be fined, they can be slapped with a fine
up to $50,000 for each violation.
In fact, that has been utilized over the past three years.
The Treasury has collected $1.7 million in fines. I think there
were 300-and-some-odd cases, if I recall correctly, of
people being penalized for this kind of violation.
Just recently, there’s been a further change which again
makes it easier to enforce. In order, the violation is not
travel to Cuba per se. It’s engaging in financial transactions,
and one of the efforts people would make before would be
to say, “I went there but I never spent any money,” even
though you have to show that you spent money on the plane
ticket. Now there’s been a change in the regulations to
create a presumption that if you went to Cuba, you did
spend money. You have a right to try and show the
administrative judge that you didn’t spend money, but the
burden is now on the individual to show that he or she
didn’t. And so again that will make it easier for the Treasury
to impose fines and otherwise to deter people from
breaking the law in this respect.
In fact, today in Miami, my deputy is up there. There’s
a meeting of officials from the Treasury Department, State
Department, and law-enforcement agencies on how to
improve enforcement of the embargo.
So it’s a serious business, and I know from riding the
planes back here myself, a lot of these people who are
coming are really being lured into it by travel agents who are
telling them, “Oh, there’s really no embargo. It’s no big
deal. Nobody ever gets prosecuted. That’s just fiction. We
assure you that you can go to Cuba and nothing will ever
come of it. You can have this great vacation.”
Well, something does come out of it. And a number of
people have been hammered by the law-enforcement
authorities for doing this. So people shouldn’t believe that
propaganda. That may make the travel provider rich, but
it’s not good for the individual.
Q: You spoke about 300 cases of people being
penalized for embargo violations. Were they all
Americans who came here specifically as tourists —
breaking the travel ban?
A. That’s a gross figure for embargo violations, even
including travel ban. And I think probably most of them
relate to that. In fact, of the criminal cases, in the last three
years, there have been nine criminal cases. And it rose to
that level. Not just these civil penalties I was talking about.
And two people were convicted there for bans that related
to travel violations. So it’s not something that’s risk-free, by
any means.
Q: Among these Americans that we’ve been
interviewing, no one has anything stamped in their
passport. They have these loose visas. Cuban
immigration has loosened its own red tape to facilitate
the Americans coming in.
A: Cuban immigration has done that for years where
they don’t put the stamp in the visa to try to hide the
evidence of it. Obviously, that’s why we don’t know every
last number of persons who come here. There are only a
few flights in and out of Cuba and people can get a fairly
good idea. I must say too, if you come through a third
country, which is how people do it, and then lie on your
customs declaration, that’s another violation. You’re
supposed to put on there all the countries you visited during
your visit and if you don’t, and somebody has observed
that, when you went to Jamaica or Cancun, you got off the
plane from Havana before you took the flight to the U.S.,
you can get in trouble there.
Yes, the Cuban authorities try to make it easier for
people to violate the law, but they are not entirely
successful.
Q: What’s the purpose of the travel ban? How do
you explain it?
A: It’s part of the overall economic sanctions that we
have against Cuba, and have had for years. Essentially this
is that the U.S. has exercised its right not to have any kind
of trade or commercial transactions with the Cuban
government. Tourism is part of that. It’s one of the big
money-maker industries here, so trying to keep people from
traveling as tourists is certainly part of the economic
sanction — to keep the government from benefiting.
Why do we have that sanction? Perhaps the tourism
area is a good example. You have essentially tourist
apartheid here. People can come as tourists, so that the
Cuban government, the Castro government, can take their
money, but they really aren’t allowed to have much contact
with Cuban people. We don’t allow investment for the same
reason. And I think, at the very least, when this is all over
and people look back, they’re going to say, “When I was
kept out of a hotel because I was a Cuban” — which is the
case in all of these fancy hotels here; you can’t go in there if
you’re a Cuban — it wasn’t a U.S. company that kept me
out.” It was a German company, or a Spanish company, or
a Canadian company, or any of the others who trade here.
They have their name over the door.
Second, if you’re a Cuban worker working in this
industry, the foreign company may hire you. They’re paying
the state $400 or $500 a month for your services. You’re
probably getting paid the equivalent of $10 a month. So, it’s
a real exploitation of the Cuban labor.
And then, as I mentioned, a lot of this tourism involves
sex tourism, exploiting the young children here that are just
so desperate for money they’ll do anything.
We think, as a national policy, that it’s better for the
United States to disassociate itself from that — not to
contribute to those kinds of activities. Other countries have
different views. We respect their views. But, that’s our
policy and that’s what the law is intended to enforce.
Q: To go back to the history: The travel embargo
went into effect a good 40 years ago, almost, before
you had foreign investment in hotels or before you had
the prostitution problem, before there was exploitation
of Cuban labor.
A: It was part of an overall ban on commercial
transactions. In fact, at one time, this was a multilateral
embargo. It was the Organization of American States that
had put both the diplomatic and economic sanctions on
Cuba for its intervention — actually, in a particular case in
Venezuela where they were trying to overthrow the
democratic government. They now admit that, by the way.
They bragged on it recently.
But the United States — even after others gave up the
idea of maintaining economic sanctions, we’ve maintained
them. And, as I say, the ban on financial transactions related
to travel is part of an overall ban on any kind of financial
transaction with the Cuban government. The basic rule is no
financial transactions. There are exceptions that allow for
the travel of journalists, for example, for the travel of
academic exchanges, for the travel of art exchanges, music
exchanges and other things of that nature that we think are
beneficial, that aren’t contributing to these bad aspects of
the regime but are trying to bring the American and Cuban
people closer.
Those can be done, but they have to be done within the
law. Doing it by going to a sleazy travel provider who’s
running some kind of a shop across the border to evade the
U.S. law — whatever one thinks of the embargo, it’s not a
good idea in terms of one’s personal safety, because you
can get hit pretty hard for penalties.
Q: On the bigger question, do you think by
generally having this travel ban and by generally
stopping most Americans from coming to Cuba —
there are some coming, but it generally stops
American tourism to Cuba — do you think it actually
stops a substantial amount of American tourist dollars
going to the Cuban government?
A: Yes. Cuba was the major center for tourism in the
Caribbean before the Cuban Revolution. I think it probably
will be again whenever Cuba opens up. And the biggest
customers for that market are Americans. But as long as
we’ve got a government that’s denying its people
fundamental freedoms and engaging in this kind of activity,
the policy has been that we’re not going to contribute to
that. And so that’s why we’re saying, “Spend your tourist
dollars someplace else and not in Cuba.”
Q: In a lot of the interviews we’ve been doing with
Americans, we find that a lot of them are Vietnam vets
or these people who are travel fiends, who have gone
around the world two times or three times and that’s
how they spend their time. And they almost have a
philosophical view on what they view as their right to
be able to travel to Cuba. In some ways, the policy
goes up against a real philosophical tenet of American
democracy.
A: American democracy. We have a constitutional
right to travel. The Supreme Court’s been clear that you
can’t stop people from traveling to any place that they want
to go. However, we don’t have a constitutional obligation to
uphold the Cuban tourist industry. It’s a difference between
saying if someone has a reason to travel for furthering views
between countries and so on, like a journalist would — they
can travel. There’s exceptions in the law for that. But to
come down just to contribute to the tourist industry of Cuba
or to invest — that’s another reason to travel, to invest
money — the courts have never held that the right to travel
includes the right to engage in every kind of financial
transaction.
So, sure, effectively it does mean that you cannot travel
to Cuba as a tourist. But there are a lot of people who have
an interest in learning more about Cuban society and so on
who hook up with a serious academic study group and
come here for that purpose. Where the amount they’re
spending is fairly minimal. They’re spending most of their
time doing some studying of what’s going on, that’s a
completely different thing than spending your weekend up at
Varadero. In many ways, you’re not even going to Cuba
when you go to these tourist enclaves. We go there to get
out of Cuba. It’s what the people here, the Cubans, call
tourist apartheid. They’re just tucked away. So it’s not even
a great way to see Cuba, to see the real Cuba.
Q: A lot of those people end up here because
they’ve lost passports or they’ve been mugged and
they come to the U.S.-interests section for help.
A: And that’s our obligation. We’re obligated to help
them by issuing a new passport if they’ve lost their passport.
Otherwise, they can’t get back into the country, if they get
in trouble with the Cuban authorities. And that, by the way,
is another thing that happens. We’ve got Americans here in
jail and we can’t get them out of jail. If they’re not born in
Cuba, we have an ability to go in and visit them and do the
kind of normal consular work we would somewhere else.
One of the problems here, frankly, is that if you were born
in Cuba — if you’re a Cuban American — the Cubans treat
you as a Cuban and they won’t let us have consular access,
even though we consider that a violation of international law.
But when people get in trouble, we help them, but that
doesn’t mean we ignore the fact that they were here. The
fact that they got their visa re-issued in Havana or something
does appear and the Treasury Department can use that to
enforce the embargo.
Q: I brought in a man in his 90s who got mugged
and lost his passport. He was here totally illegally, and
I met him in a hotel by accident and facilitated
bringing him over here. And nothing ever happened to
him — except that they helped him here and got him a
new passport.
A: Well, you know the Treasury Department can’t
prosecute every case, can’t fine every case. It’s going to be
easier for them now because there’s this presumption that, if
you were here, you did spend money — which is really a
pretty reasonable presumption. Before, they didn’t have
that. They had to have some further indication that one had
spent money here. But I would say we do have this duty.
We provide assistance to Americans who get arrested
overseas, even if they are arrested for perfectly legitimate
reasons. We have people in jail here who hijacked
airplanes, who were drug dealers and so on. And we go in
and we provide consular services. That doesn’t mean we
approved of what they were doing. It’s not an inconsistency
in our overall policy. That we have a heart as far as
protecting people’s individual rights and so on.
At the same time, they are going to suffer the
consequences of violating the law, whether it’s the foreign
law or our own. And you can do both things.
Q: What’s your advice to these people?
A: Don’t come. Or if you’re interested in seeing Cuba
and you have some real academic interest in it or interest in
promoting artistic exchanges or something, apply to the
Treasury Department. Find out how you can get a license
so that you can come legally. But if you’re just a tourist who
wants to come and have a good time at the beach, go
someplace else. Don’t come to Cuba. It’s against the law.